How Content Marketing Changed From Recent Events

If I had to use one word to describe the situation with content publishers and ad revenue as of late, it would be “tumultuous”. The ad revenue game was already facing some serious headwinds before The Great Upheaval. Google was looking to kill the third-party cookie, brand safety concerns ran rampant, and the sheer amount of technology and middlemen literally left a third of digital ad spend unaccounted for. With that as the backdrop, along came the health crisis, which created a situation where unprecedented traffic numbers were going unmonetized due to keyword blocks and a dramatic slash in marketing budgets across the board. Add to that the civil unrest of the last month, which pushed brands to temporarily go dark out of respect and solidarity. 

To say that the environment is less than ideal would be the understatement of the century. With all that being said, when looking at the big picture, there is, surprisingly, a recovery happening. Let’s dive in. The Show Must Go On after all. Some real talk: Somewhere over the last month or two a choice has been made to reopen at all costs. Globally, there seems to be a consensus building that the world can no longer afford to keep the economy shuttered. It’s not my place to argue for or against this trend. This is just what’s happening. Health impact aside, this “show must go on” mentality is most definitely starting to be felt when it comes to ad revenue. People are trying to return to some semblance of normalcy and stability. That return includes getting out of the house, eating at restaurants, shopping outside more, and so on. In our particular case, this means that marketing decisions are no longer made minute-by-minute. 

There is a collective push to return to business-as-usual for businesses, even if the usual is currently unusual. This means that companies have come back to planning. Brands are figuring out how to adjust their strategy for the new normal, and are starting to spend again. This also means that publishers optimizing for ad revenue have also started planning, evaluating, and restarting their spend. 

A Semblance of Normalcy Once the advertising landscape cratered in March, we saw that a lot of the norms we were used to weren’t happening anymore. For example, in normal times, we could generally expect CPCs to be low at the beginning of the month, and then slowly go up toward the end of the month. In parallel to CPCs going up gradually, the on-site revenue (RPM) would also go up. This didn’t happen in March, April, or May. Here are May’s stats for reference: However, this seems to be changing in June, and things are starting to look much better. Here’s what’s been happening in June so far: All indications are that CPC and RPM are finally starting to behave predictably again. And even better news - RPMs are ramping up quicker than CPCs, thereby increasing profitability. A lot of content marketing lessons have been learned during this pandemic.

User habits are returning to normal again as well. For example, mobile browsing is back on the rise, after slumping in March and April. Looking Ahead We’re hearing positive signals across the board from content publishers and advertisers in the age of Covid-19. They’re expecting July to hold steady and ad revenue to increase over August and September. The consensus is that brands have been holding on to budget from Q2 and plan on spending it in Q3 and Q4. Other trends of note: Video CPMs seem to be relatively high-yield over the last month or so. 

Health-related content is doing incredibly well, which isn’t surprising. The publishers who are generating the most consistent profit currently are those with direct-sold inventory. Beefing up sales teams to create these deals seems to be paying off for them. So is ad revenue making a comeback? 

Probably, and publishers should examine what they can do to make the most of it. That being said, there is really only one way to crisis-proof publishers, and that is diversification. Relying on one source of revenue is just not tenable. If you haven’t yet looked at new revenue channels, this stability is the perfect opportunity to do so. So let’s get to work. What’s going on in your neck of the woods? I would love to hear about how you’re approaching ad revenue and overall diversification. It’s also worth noting that being back to normal patterns means that July CPCs will be starting low, with a huge opportunity to scale, so it’s a good time to invest in paid traffic. If you want to learn a bit more about what Marketing Masterminds can do to help you improve your paid distribution strategy, make sure to visit our Contact Us page.

This week, I’ve been reading about how publishers are responding to (and monetizing) the uptick in time spent on mobile devices and social platforms. Kiplinger, for example, recently revamped its website with a new mobile-first design in response to a shift in reader habits. Condé Nast, on the other hand, announced seven new podcasts, including “The Pitchfork Review,” “Get Wired,” and “In Vogue,” all of which will be part of the new Condé Nast Podcast Network. 

It’s no secret that the events of this year have caused an overall surge in social media marketing usage, and the latest projections show that we can expect this trend to continue through the end of this year and into 2025. Translation: now is a particularly good time for publishers to leverage paid social to drive affiliate dollars and ad revenue.

As publishers continue to adapt by pivoting from in-person events to virtual ones or developing new ways to reduce their reliance on cookies, they’ve also been doubling down on a channel with a tried-and-true history of driving engagement: email. 

TIME, for example, recently launched Camp TFK, a new weekday newsletter designed to help parents who are working from home this summer. Curated by TIME for Kids editors, the new program offers free, kid-friendly activities that require minimal adult supervision. Newsletter-first publishers are also expanding their email efforts — the popular Morning Brew newsletter recently debuted its latest product geared toward marketing professionals, aptly dubbed Marketing Brew. 

And speaking of newsletter-first publishers, Digiday recently reported that some of the format’s major players are having success growing the lifetime value of their subscriber bases through referral programs. According to Adam Ryan, President of The Hustle, not only is the lifetime value of a referral program participant multiple times higher than the company’s typical subscriber, but the open rate for referred subscribers is double that of the average subscriber as well.

Content marketing is changing during Covid-19, and you need to keep adapting!

A Content Subscription Campaign Tale - Publisher Pivots During Coronavirus

Content Creators During Coronavirus

I think I’ve lost count by now of how many times I’ve written about subscription campaigns here. The Great Upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic, protests, riots, and political unrest has driven publishers to test new revenue streams in order to diversify, and we’ve seen a lot of our customers begin to test subscription strategies. 

There has also been a significant change for publishers who have been running subscription campaigns for a long time. Their traffic has increased and subscription costs have gone down significantly. That being said, successful publishers haven’t been using a “set it and forget it” method. A lot of work is put into optimizing campaigns for maximum ROI. 

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Shannon Rose from the Boston Globe about how they built out their subscription campaigns, and was particularly fascinated with the amount of A/B testing they do to keep their offering healthy, and what we can learn from that about subscription strategies as a whole. That’s what I want to talk about this week, so let’s dive into this publisher's pivoting and content campaigns. 

Testing, Testing, 1-2-3 

At the end of the day, running a subscription campaign has the same exact framework as you’d see for any other performance marketing campaign. You need to examine the full funnel from the user’s first interaction, down through the purchase, and optimize all along that funnel. The main difference with subscription campaigns is that they involve a recurring purchase by the user. This means you need to think beyond the initial action. There are two things that happen as a result of that: 

1. Your CPA goal doesn’t need to be geared toward the initial action, but rather, it can be optimized toward a user’s average lifetime value. 

2. Your campaign doesn’t stop with the first action, working on retention is critical to maintain success. 

Like any performance campaign, you need all engines humming to maximize ROI. The best way to do this is through rigorous A/B testing and data analysis. The thing is, you can’t A/B test everything all the time. Going back to the Globe, they went about it in a very methodical way, testing specific elements separately to come to the ideal configuration. 

Test Type 1: Offering 

Pricing out your product is always a huge challenge. For the Globe, they were looking for a model that would strike the perfect balance between bringing in new users and making sure they stay. 

Price too high initially - and your conversion rate may go down. 

Price too low initially - and people may not renew if the price point is significantly higher. 

At the Globe, their tests revealed that a deep discount in the initial offer was the most worthwhile. They came to this conclusion after rigorous A/B testing, along with a big data analysis push. In short - this was not a call from the gut. The data is what made the decision. 

That wasn’t the only place the data spoke louder than words. The Boston Globe works with a paywall. Like any other publisher, they had to decide how many articles they would show a user before the paywall was activated. This is often a tough decision. Even more challenging is that it doesn’t live in a bubble. The subscription price and article limit go hand in hand, and influence one another. In the case of the Globe, they found that a low price point accompanied with a low article limit yielded the best results. 

Test Type 2: Channels And Campaigns 

Of course, now that you know what your offering looks like, you need to decide where you’re going to tell people about it. Most publishers use a mix of organic channels, their owned channels - like on site optimization and newsletter promotions, and paid channels ranging from display to paid search. 

The Boston Globe tested out a wide range of paid channels, using mostly direct response messaging - i.e. a very straightforward pitch to subscribe. They were able to get all of those channels to perform, but decided on a content-first approach for paid social. This allowed the Globe to put their brand front and center - using their world-class journalism to bring in relevant audiences. This expanded approach allowed them to expand their reach, and had the added benefit of bringing in younger demographics compared to other channels. 

Of course, moving ahead with content campaigns brought in another level of testing - looking at the types of content that drove the highest subscription rates. They picked from the Globe’s top performing organic content to test new articles consistently. For the Globe, as of now, they find local reporting works best, but that doesn’t mean, they’re going to stop testing other types. After all, people are people, and people change, so if local news resonates today, sports could challenge that if, say, the Patriots win another Super Bowl. 

Test Type 3: Retention 

As I mentioned above, for every good subscription campaign, there should be an equal retention campaign. There are numerous ways to approach these campaigns, and the Globe, with an agency's help, continues to run tests to see what has the biggest impact. The process the Globe uses is basically to pick a hypothesis based on their own data, and create campaigns to test this. For example, they ran a test to see if retention rates increased if they targeted specific users during their first 60 days. Compared to their internal numbers, that yielded good results. But as with everything else I’ve outlined, this doesn’t mean that testing is done. 

I think the lesson here, when looking at the big picture, is that a consistent, data-driven testing cadence is the best way to go to continue to get great results. Like everything else in life, growth and evolution is key to thriving. 

Content Creators Publishing Pivots

Life looks a lot different this year. Across countless facets of both work and home life, many changes that were already underway are now taking place at “warp speed.” There is, perhaps, no better example of this phenomenon than the astronomical rise in e-commerce sales. As this trend continues — and does so with absolutely no signs of slowing down — more and more publishers are investing in e-commerce-related revenue opportunities. 

These weren’t the only topics that were top-of-mind for me this week, though. Here are a few highlights from what I’ve been reading. 

- Condé Nast’s GQ launched The GQ Shop along with its own line of products after having notable success with its affiliate business. Revenue from its affiliate sales hub, GQ Recommends, is up 105% year to date over 2019. 

- Email newsletters are also a great channel for driving affiliate dollars according to email expert, BuzzFeed alum, and friend, Dan Oshinsky. 

- Podcasts continue to have a moment this year, too, with a recent Nielsen survey showing that 23% of remote workers listen every day to "spoken word" audio content. 

- How does The Boston Globe find high-value subscribers? With a helping hand from paid content distribution on Facebook. 

Content Campaign Conclusion

What these and other top publishers teach us is that you always need to make adjustments and think outside the box in a challenging economy. Keep up with your content marketing and subscription campaigns!